Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.

Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.

The FBI apparently learned some lessons on how to deal with Russian interference since 2016 and made some arrests this time around. Way too little too late though, and in January Trump’s cronies will take over and that’ll be that. Other countries should take notes though and start being much harsher on Russian trolls and their puppets. Unfortunately Von Der Layen recently fired the guy who was prosecuting Musk over Twitter so I’m not too confident anyone in power learned their lesson. Which is mind-boggling because russian-backed far-right parties are a meaningful electoral threat to people like Von Der Layen.

I mean, she did try other things as well and that characterization is a bit reductive. More correctly I think we can say that “she’s not him” is the only thing the Sanders->Cheney spectrum could ever agree on and nothing else she did “stuck”. Sanders wasn’t happy about the pro-israel stuff and Cheney probably wasn’t happy about the “tax the rich” stuff.

Choosing one clear ideology and sticking to it might sound great to the progressives on here (and to people like Hasan), but I don’t have the hubris to think she or anyone within the Democratic party establishment actually had the charisma to pull that off either (maybe Michele Obama but she didn’t wanna do it so that’s the end of that plan). Especially considering Harris had like 4 months to pull a campaign together and did not have any previous popular good will to rely on.

4 months is very short and no matter how right you play your cards a lot of voters will not know anything about you other than “she’s not Him”. Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose (not that she did everything right but I think a postmortem will need to look back way further than that at Biden and Hillary and those who supported them).

Everyone from Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Harris. Anyone who was paying any attention and wasn’t a literal fascist voted for her. The direction of the swing seems irrelevant.

The swing fell short because it’s not so much about direction than strength. Macron in 2017 ran the most “hard center” presidential campaign imaginable. Difference is it worked, not because his centrist program was particularly novel but in large part because he is a very charismatic figure and managed to create a voting base of hopefuls for himself. The same can broadly be argued about Obama (whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

Harris ran on a platform of… “I’m not him”. Which to any reasonable person is an obvious “yeah OK”, but unfortunately most Americans are apathetic cretins who will refuse to move their asses to a polling station if the guy on the telly doesn’t promise them a blowie at the voting booth. And the Democrat establishment is simultaneously too big to fail and incapable of producing an actually charismatic leader.

Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.

My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.

Is that even a stated goal? I swear we’ve been waiting for that to exist for the better part of a decade. It would solve so many issues and comes up in every discussion about Javascript, yet the powers that be seem to have zero interest in pushing this forward.

What even are GCC’s advantages in 2024, besides “we painted ourselves in a corner with proprietary extensions” (e.g. Linux)? That aside I personally only see upsides to clang, but I don’t routinely do C work and maybe I’m missing something.

Removed by mod

Source?

In the EU at least this is demonstrably false. LNG has slightly risen since 2000 but other fossil fuels (namely coal) have gone way down. Total consumption has been steadily declining in the past few years and is down to 2004 levels. So overall our electricity is a whole shitload cleaner.

The story is even starker for domestic heating. Gas and coal are vanishing since the mid-2000s.

Is that a regional thing? In my part of Europe virtually 60-70+ year old house comes standard with it. But the fact that English lacks a word for “soupirail” (or that Wikipedia only has a page in French and Dutch) leads me to believe it might not be a very widespread practice outside of Western Europe.

It often gets repurposed as an air vent, for general ventilation and/or as a clothes dryer exhaust. I rarely see them permanently blocked out.

Kids finish school around 3 pm where I live. They have time to do their extracurricular activities (partially) during daytime even in the dead of winter. So of course it’s the mornings they find dreadful. If school finished around 5-6 pm I think they’d be miserable then as well.

Speaking of which, I’m about to end my work day and the sun is setting right now. FML.

Yes it would. I, like most 21st century humans, wake up for work and have free time after work.

In practice for my relatively northern latitude this means I get a little bit of daylight before work (except perhaps around december/january), but winter time is very specifically designed so that today the sun will set exactly 6 minutes before I end my work day.

Were we to keep permanent DST I would get an hour of free time in the daylight today, and at least a little bit of light outside for all winter except perhaps for a month around December. As it stands, I do not get any free time in sunlight for 5 days a week for the entire duration of ST. The switch to ST means “bye-bye sun” and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I FUCKING HATE IT.

The 24 hour clock is a made up construct. So are business hours. But if we already agreed to change one of these twice a year, can we make it so that it is not optimized to trap me inside for the entire duration of daytime???

Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn’t inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one’s default terminal. Blegh.

Also if you’re not going to leverage Vim’s main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.

He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon’s worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.

“First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked” seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren’t as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn’t implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want “open twitter with decent moderation” and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.

Just factually wrong. Russian maintainers were removed from their positions. They are still allowed to contribute, but they’ll have to get a non-Russian maintainer to sign off on it. This removes “FSB coerces Russian maintainer into signing off on malware” as an attack vector, while having the minimum possible impact on Russian contributors whose code will be checked for correctness like anyone else’s.

Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.

Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.

I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.

Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.

How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.

Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.

Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.

Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.

I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.

Brother, these games are thirteen to thirty years old and therefore not in any way relevant to the discussion.

For our sanity we must let TES go. Since Skyrim, Bethesda has only developed Simplified Skyrim In The Wasteland, Buggy Skyrim in the Multiplayer Wasteland, and Very Boring Skyrim in Empty Space. And about a bajillion outright Skyrim re-releases.

Their current leadership is incapable of acknowledging the failures of Starfield, from uninspired game design to extremely outdated engine that holds back the very fundamental vision of the game. Since Bethesda’s leadership hasn’t changed or acknowledged their wrongs, we have every reason to believe that TES6 will make the same mistakes. They do not have the means of their ambition anymore.

It’s really funny when you think about it. Nearly all movie planets are actually real places on Earth, from Tatooine (Tunisia) to Endor (Washington IIRC).

Even funnier, a lot of low-budget alien planets (especially the rocky sceneries) are found within a 30 mi radius of Hollywood or whatever the actor guild considers a long distance shoot.

The people doing this kind of bullshit are either children or fascists. They aren’t interested in “healthy debate” with you. They are lashing out at the Great Woke Bogeyman.

Honestly we should be relieved that the time these brainrotted fascists spend vandalizing Wikipedia isn’t spent sending rape or death threats to the developers, which is usually how these witch-hunts on “woke” go.